by John Harvey
Mary heaved a sigh and groped for Cheryl’s hand. “I was frightened.”
“Of course you were,” Cheryl patting her, nodding, all the while thinking, you bastard, you cowardly bastard. Asking her, before she left, “This paper you say he gave you, you haven’t still got it, I suppose? That or something with his address, a card?”
She pulled out the card, cheaply printed, from behind the cups and saucers at the side. “I’ll just borrow this, Mary, for a while, okay?”
Mary looked alarmed. “I wouldn’t want to cause any trouble.”
“Don’t you worry,” Cheryl said. “It’ll all be fine.”
The offices of the Sheriff Finance and Loan Company were on the Alfreton Road above a burned-out tandoori take-away and adjacent to a lock-up shop trading in second-hand electrical goods and vinyl albums on which the names Neil Sedaka and Roger Whitaker were writ large. There was neither carpet nor lino on the stairs.
Sonia White was just scrolling another invoice into the Olivetti when Cheryl knocked and barged right in. Sonia around Cheryl’s age, thirty-nine, skinny where Cheryl was, well, amply covered, and not only having problems striking the right keys but enjoying a seriously bad hair day into the bargain. The ends of her fingers were blotched white with Tippex.
“Mr Dunn?”
Sonia blinked. “No.”
“When are you expecting him?”
“Nobody of that name works here.”
Cheryl produced the card she had taken from Mary Coles’ kitchen. “This says he does.”
Sonia eyed Cheryl with suspicion. “Mr Dunn sometimes works for us. He never works here.”
Cheryl was getting fed up with this, royally pissed off. “How does this arrangement work?” she asked. “Fax and mobile phone, or perhaps you’re a dab hand with a weegee board?”
The blinking increased, accompanied now by a pronounced tilt of the head. “Mr Dunn telephones here and speaks to Mr McStay.” The sign on the door behind her, one of those instant engraving jobs they specialise in at shoe repairers, read Jason McStay, Manager.
“And,” suggested Cheryl, “Mr McStay tells him to go out and terrify an old woman, half crippled and living on her own, frighten the life out of her for the sake of five fucking pounds.”
Sonia pursed her lips. Cheryl half expected her to say, “Language!” and tut-tut. She was the sort, Cheryl thought, for whom the expression ‘having relations’ didn’t mean a visit from your gran or a great aunt.
“Is he here?” Cheryl asked, pointing towards the inner office.
“Not presently.”
Jesus, Cheryl thought. “And when will he be here, or is he busy off somewhere threatening old ladies, too?”
“There is no need to cast aspersions,” Sonia said, getting older by the minute. “Mr McStay is a perfectly respectable businessman and, besides, you can’t see him without an appointment. He never sees anyone without an appointment.”
“Oh,” said Cheryl, “and how do I get one of those?”
“Write a letter, stating the nature of your business and we will contact you in due course.”
“I’ll bet,” Cheryl said. “I’ll bet you will, my arse.”
That evening, Cheryl left Vicki watching EastEnders with a friend from school who lived two floors up, and went to Sherwin Road on foot. Mary was bearing up, happy enough to have Cheryl mash tea and butter toast, but worried sick about where she was going to find ten pounds.
“Relax, sweetheart,” Cheryl told her. “Don’t you worry. I’ll look after it, I promise.”
And the way Mary had looked at her, squinting up from the one good side of her face, had made Cheryl all the more determined that she would.
There were only two pubs she thought Ted Cole would have walked to for his regular meetings with Reggie Dunn, The Happy Return and the 17th–21st Lancers. Never The Grove, too full of students and student nurses. Cheryl called in both of them and Dunn wasn’t in either, but, just as she’d guessed, he was known. “You tell him I’m looking for him,” Cheryl said. “Cheryl Wheeler. Just you tell him that.” Staring at the barman hard, daring him to make some crack.
Three days passed and nothing happened, nothing out of the usual. Vicki went to school and came home. Cheryl drove her van round the streets of mostly terraced houses, the rent-controlled flats and the back-to-backs. On the Thursday evening, for a treat, she walked with Vicki to the chippie and carried it back, warm through the wrappings of paper, cod and chips twice, two pickled onions, a can of Vimto and a Pepsi. Somebody’s birthday, Cheryl thought, when they found the lift still working. It didn’t matter, the whole block had been tarted up something righteous, even moved them out for a spell while the work was done, lifts were lifts all the same which meant, more often than not, not working.
Up on the eighth floor, Vicki jumped past the slow sliding door and out on to the balcony and before Cheryl could follow her an arm slammed across in front of her, one foot braced to keep the lift door open. “I hear you been looking for me?” Reggie Dunn’s flat, round face glaring in.
“Vicki!” Cheryl shouted, but all the girl could do was stare, mouth wide, at her mother trapped on the far side of the man’s spread body. Reggie Dunn, tall, fat, strong.
“Vicki!” Cheryl shouted again.
“Never mind her,” Dunn said.
Vicki didn’t move; didn’t run.
“You been mouthing me in my local, running round my boss, making all these lyin’ fuckin’ allegations. Sticking your tart’s nose where nobody asked it to go. In my affairs. And you got to learn that’s not on.”
Cheryl ducked her head. “Vicki, run and . . .”
His hand caught her round the neck, forcing her back. “Never mind fuckin’ Vicki. Never mind her. What you want to think about is me. Me. Reggie Dunn.” His knuckle was pressing hard against her windpipe, making it difficult for her to breathe. “If I ever, ever, hear of you interfering with me again, the way I do my job, anything, your life won’t be worth livin’. Right?”
And faster than he had any right to be, pushing her roughly back, he pressed the bottom button on the lift and sent her down; Vicki’s face, shocked and pale, the last thing Cheryl saw before the door slid closed. Vicki and that bastard alone on that eighth floor balcony.
The lift seemed to take hours to descend and when it had, Cheryl wasn’t prepared to risk it again. She raced the stairs, lungs rasping, backs of her legs aching by the time she swung around on to the open walkway and there was Vicki, leaning over the railing, staring down, hands clenched fast, her still child’s body racked by sobs and tears. Chips and broken pieces of fish, some stamped on, lay strewn across the floor, paper wrapping itself around the metal rails, the backs of Vicki’s legs. Of Dunn there was no sign.
Cheryl caught her daughter fast and cursed and cried and kissed her hair.
Resnick had the CID room to himself. The door to his own office, a partitioned-off section of the long, rectangular room, was open, revealing a desk crowded with papers, Home Office bulletins and memoranda, case files and rosters and scraps of paper on which his sergeant, Graham Millington, had scribbled important messages in a hurried and largely indecipherable hand. Around him, typewriters waited silent, VDU screens tilted blankly save for the rhythmic blip of cursors and in ragged tintinnabulation, telephones rang and continued to ring unanswered. Although the windows facing on to the Derby Road were unhealthily closed, the constant drum of traffic underscored everything, accented every now and again by the clash of gears as an articulated lorry approached the Canning Circus roundabout.
Kevin Naylor and Lynn Kellogg were out on the Broxtowe Estate, investigating an attack on the house of a widower who was suspected of having grassed to the police about one of his neighbours. Broken windows, excrement smeared across the front door and pushed in parcels through the letter box, vilification tagged on his walls in fluorescent colours, four feet high. And all the man had done was wave down the local Panda patrol and complain about his bike having been ni
cked from his backyard, the second in as many weeks.
Millington himself, Carl Vincent in tow, had hurried off in the direction of Angel Row, where a posse of eight or nine youths, the youngest no more than nine years old, had steamed through one of the major clearing banks, waiting for one of the staff to pass through the security doors and barging past him, while others vaulted on to and over the counters. Several hundred pounds missing, one clerk elbowed in the face, a have-a-go customer knifed in the thigh, and all in around three minutes flat.
It was the third such incident in the city centre in the past month; all the kids wore sweatshirt hoods around their heads, scarves across their faces; limber, lithe and fast; black, white and shades between. Caught on the security cameras their exploits would have made an excellent commercial for one of the new alcoholic lemonades or Pepé jeans, but when it came to identification they were next to useless.
Turning, Resnick picked up a telephone at random and identified himself. Forty-five minutes later, Cheryl Wheeler was sitting opposite him in his office, Cheryl dressing down according to the seriousness of the situation, wide black trousers, denim shirt, boots with a three inch heel. Outside, Millington and Vincent had returned and were interviewing the parents of one possible suspect, a youth of fourteen who had already been taken into care twice as being beyond parental control. “What’d you have me do,” the father was saying, “tie the little bastard to his bed, burn all his soddin’ clothes?” He had tried both and neither had worked.
“I know you, don’t I?” Resnick said. “We’ve met before but I can’t think where.”
Cheryl’s mouth widened into a smile. “It was here in the canteen.”
“Right. Carole? Caroline?”
“Cheryl.”
“Of course.” Resnick’s turn to smile. Charlie Parker with Miles Davis and Max Roach. Nineteen forty-seven. ‘Cheryl’. One of those bouncy little blues themes Bird used to love to play. “Tell me about it,” he said. “From the beginning, tell me what happened.” Impressed by Cheryl’s fire as he listened, the righteousness of the anger brimming inside her, the love.
“Why didn’t you come in last night?” Resnick asked when she had finished. “Report it then?”
“I was bloody scared, why d’you think? And I wasn’t going to leave her, Vicki, I wasn’t going to leave her and no way was she moving out of that flat, not if I’d dragged her kicking and screaming.”
“He didn’t touch her?” Resnick asked, the second time.
Cheryl shook her head.
“You’re sure?”
“She wouldn’t lie. Not about a thing like that.”
“And you?”
Unbuttoning the top buttons, Cheryl pulled back her shirt to show him the bruises, colouring well, to her neck. The most prominent, purple, the perfect size and shape of a large thumb.
“I’d like to have some photographs taken. If you’ve no objection?”
“Suit yourself. Go ahead. Take as many as you like. Just so long as that bastard ends up inside.”
“You would be willing to give evidence? If he were charged.”
Her eyes widened. “What d’you mean, if?”
“There was no one else saw what happened, no other witnesses?”
“My Vicki, she was there all the time.”
“You might not want her,” Resnick said, “giving evidence in court, standing up to cross-examination. Always supposing the CPS would want her on the stand.”
Cheryl swept back the chair as she rose to her feet. “You’re going to do soddin’ nothing, that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You’re going to let the bastard go scot-free.”
“No, Cheryl,” Resnick said, “That’s not what I’m saying at all.”
Sonia thought it would be a good idea if she had one of those signs like the ones on her boss’s door, the one that said Jason McStay, Manager, right there on her desk. Free-standing. Easy to shift then, when Sonia had a dust and tidy. Not Receptionist, though; Secretary. No tone. Personal Assistant to the Manager. No, that was too long, they’d never fit it all on. But, Sonia White, Managerial Assistant, that would be fine. Real class. She would ask Mr McStay when he came back in. At least then, people wouldn’t gawp and talk to her like she was part of the furniture; that woman who’d been in the other day, all scarlet nails and scarlet mouth and that ghastly leisure suit . . . Sonia shuddered. Women like her gave a new meaning to the word cheap.
Five minutes later when the door opened and McStay came in, a bit of a face on him, Sonia hesitated that fatal second too long.
“Get us a coffee, Sonia. Two sugars. It’s a bastard of a day.”
“Yes, Mr McStay.”
What she did was nip across and buy him a cream slice, refresh her lipstick and bring in his coffee and cake with her best professional smile. “Mr McStay, I’ve been meaning to ask . . .”
He hardly seemed to listen, uncertain whether to utilise the plastic knife in his drawer since his last Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner or bring the whole thing to his mouth and hope for the best.
“So, I mean, Mr McStay, what d’you think?”
“I think anyone with half a brain, walking in and seeing you plonked down behind the typewriter can see you’re the sodding secretary, so what’s the point?”
She’d scarcely got over that when a big man knocked and entered. Quite a nice suit, Sonia thought, a little old-fashioned but she didn’t mind that; shame though about the stains on his tie. She wondered if he were the new collector Mr McStay had set on: a nice look about the eyes that might charm a few of the old dears at least.
When Resnick showed her his warrant card, she knew she’d been barking up the wrong tree. “Mr McStay doesn’t normally see people without a written appointment,” she began, but her heart wasn’t in it. “I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr McStay,” she said into the receiver, “but there’s a policeman here to see you.”
Resnick smiled his thanks and went on through.
In the course of McStay’s journey from Belfast to Glasgow via Tyneside and Sheffield and a few minor diversions between, there were times when he’d drifted more than close to the wind. Since setting up Sheriff Finance and Loan here in the city, he’d had more than a few warnings – employing personnel with a penchant for violent behaviour, exceeding the duly constituted Codes of Practice, failing to pay National Insurance contributions for all of his staff as well as some little negligence over taxes; the arson attack on a persistent defaulter was little more than a rumour and remained unproved, though not for want of trying.
So McStay sent Sonia in search of more coffee, which Resnick tasted but didn’t drink, laying out the case against one Reginald Alexander Dunn, currently in McStay’s employ.
McStay was shocked, almost apoplectic with apology. He had no idea of the tactics that Dunn had been using and neither did he condone them in any way, shape or form. And to attack a member of the public, threaten her little girl . . . “You leave it to me, Inspector. I’ll deal with it forthwith. The last thing I want, the name of this firm dragged through the mire. Business like mine, well, you can imagine, trust and confidence of our clients, that’s what it depends upon. No, he’s in here and I’m telling him straight. He’ll not work for me again.”
Resnick nodded. “Just one other thing.”
McStay’s eyebrow twitched.
“Standard loan contracts, the kind your firm uses . . . You do issue contracts?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“All the time?”
“Everything above board.”
“Each and every case?”
“Yes.”
“So the papers concerning Ted Coles’ loan, they’ll be here on file?”
“Somewhere, yes. Sonia can . . .”
Resnick leaned forward, just a little. “Isn’t there a clause, in the event of the death of the borrower, the remainder of the debt is set aside?”
McStay could smell something distressingly like his own sweat. “Usually, yes.”
“I daresay, yes, but, like I say, I can check.”
“So you’ve been collecting on a contract that was legally null and void, in addition to persuading an elderly stroke victim to take out a second loan to cover that non-existent debt?”
“I think . . . I mean, I can see there’s almost certainly been an administrative oversight and . . .”
“And you’ll make restitution immediately? Full financial restitution?”
“Well, naturally, yes.”
“Plus, I daresay, a bonus to compensate for your client’s deep discomfort?”
“I think we could see our way . . .”
“A generous bonus?”
“Yes, yes, you have my word.”
Resnick rose to his feet. “I think what I’d be happier with, if it’s all the same to you, let’s have the figures down on paper. Nice and clear. Signed. You know the kind of thing.”
“Graham,” Resnick said, back at the station. Resnick had nipped into the Gents to relieve himself and found his sergeant doing something decorative to his moustache with a pair of nail scissors. At least it meant he couldn’t whistle ‘Winchester Cathedral’ at the same time.
“Boss?”
“You remember that arson attack, February? Halal butchers on the Ilkeston Road.”
Millington wiggled his upper lip, rabbit like, in front of the mirror. “Loan shark we liked for it, if it’s the one I’m thinking. McFall?”
“McStay.”
“That’s him. Sheriff something-or-other. Robin Hood in reverse sort of thing. Steal from the poor and keep McStay in Alfa Romeos.”
“Right. Well, I think we might be able to squeeze out a little insider information.”
Millington slipped the nail scissors down into their plastic leather-look case and looked interested.
